Dr. Ery Shin Lecturer, Stanford University Gertrude Stein’s Surrealist Turn back into Time Originally motivated by Stein’s own questions regarding WWII, this paper thinks through Stein’s surrealist gestures against the backdrop of WWII and her own Jewish-American heritage. If The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas spurred Stein’s thoughts on lived experience and its memorialization, storytelling assumes a more urgent role in Stein’s later works, penned in the world of Hitler’s absolutist fables. Within such a political atmosphere, what is the reader to make of Stein’s focus on life writing, a gesture complicating her ongoing repudiation of Aristotelian time? How does one read Stein as a writer engaging with history rather than exclusively dwelling on the ahistorical (what Stein famously calls the “continuous present”)? How war’s oppositional logic informs Stein’s later surrealist works consequently becomes the focus here (which isn’t to say that Stein identified as a surrealist proper, being averse to Breton’s publicity stunts and general bravura)—say, Ida A Novel, Paris France, Mrs. Reynolds, and The World is Round. That is, where surrealism most enriches our understanding of Stein’s last decades lies in its poetics of oppositions. In the 1930s and 40s, for a Jewish-American expatriate residing in France, surrealism renders the era’s radically dystopian energies legible, but also imbued with a sense of their own erasure. The self negating the self; wandering against a backdrop of increasingly limited freedoms; circumventing time altogether; a civilization of lonely loners—to be clear, such paradoxical strands aren’t framed by Breton’s revolutionism. Rather than drawing out life’s possibilities, they epitomize Stein’s urgent, if ambivalent, return to the historical. From The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas onward, Stein outwardly repudiates narrative writing even as she translates her experiences of storytelling’s world-shaping force—on celebrity, on the Aryan ideal—in the language of the marvelous. .